Chris McQuilkin - Power Athlete

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. But are you leveraging it? And perhaps more importantly, are you saving yourself time and making more money because of it? Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's trainwithmorpheusmo r p s dot com. Boom, we're live. Chris McQuilkin. Welcome to the future of fitness, man. How are you doing? Great.

And we're Friday afternoon, man. Thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, yeah. It's uh you're not gonna catch me in a much better mood than the last meeting on a Friday. So uh here we are. After this, I'm heading off. I'm skiing, man. I'm a ghost.

Sweet. I I have never been skiing. I'm from Houston area, and then went to to college on East Coast in Washington, D.C. And opportunity never presented itself. Now I'm west of Austin, so out in the hill country.

Well, man, now you got a friend up in Whitefish, Montana. So uh oh my goodness. Yeah, make it happen. Make it happen, Chris.

Montana and Texas are the two two go-to places now, it seems.

It it is, right? Uh and it's interesting. I was I was talking to one of my clients, uh Erica Suter. Uh, shout out to Erica. Uh a lot of people seem to be moving from Texas up to Montana now. And I'm well, everyone's moving into Texas, so we got to go somewhere. Yeah, exactly. What a weird dude. How much uh migration has happened? I mean, you know, mont up here in Montana, everybody's freaked out with the californication that's taking place. Uh, but it's like, hey, what are you gonna do? It's gonna happen eventually. Uh but it's so crazy. Like, you know, all these seems like all these could be a lot of people from New York, New Jersey, Washington, California, and Texas, of course, you know, it's now starting to see a lot of license plates from there. It's so weird, man. Um, I know Austin, you guys are one of the most popular destination moving spots out there.

Well, it is a it's beautiful, it's a cool city, and I feel the weather is gonna surprise a lot of people moving here because it ranges from 110 degrees in the summer, and then to this morning we were looking at 28. Wow. So some some people are gonna get either frostbit or some heat exhaustion. But but hey, yeah, I I'm actually way out west of Austin in a small town called Dripping Springs. So I got my small community, we got a three-bar town, and I'm I'm very happy. Well, yeah, I'll let the city outgrow itself in uh well, I still got the country. What uh what's the population out there in your town? Last last I checked, so I moved 2017 and 1700 people. We got one. I would so I grew up in the Houston area, west of Houston is a small town called Katy, where we had two high schools growing up. So I would measure towns based off that. So Drip, we got one high school so far, and it's 1,700 people. I imagine it's grown since, but uh yeah, sitting pretty right now at one high school.

1,700. That's tiny. That's great. Yeah, we uh when we started looking for places to live outside of uh California in in 2017, we we kind of set some parameters, and one of them was we didn't want anything over 10,000 in population. Yes, and uh we came to here, but now we're booming. I mean, it's it's gonna be, you know, uh in the greater Flathead Valley is probably gonna end up being like 30,000, 40,000 within the next few years. So oh well, secrets out. Um you're on the ground floor. Yeah, yeah, that's good news for sure. So, man, let's uh let's talk about you for a little bit. Let's talk about what you're doing at power athlete. And I guess the the place I always like to start, Chris, is just give us a little bit of your backstory. How did you get to be where you are a power athlete? And yeah, what what led you to this?

That it it has been a long road and uh very fortunate. So I played lacrosse on the East Coast, and that had an interest in sports performance, but as the an athlete, we had no formal strength and conditioning. And in search of what degree and major to get into, I was into performance because I wanted to succeed as an athlete, and I didn't have that outlet, so I just took health health sciences, and I then had the opportunity after graduate become a grad assistant coach with my team. And I grew up in Texas as as I mentioned earlier, and I was a football player with a stick on the lacrosse field. It was more of the speed weight room guy, the goon that you'd put in to use his head as a weapon versus formally play the sport. I found my niche and my role within my team, and when I became a coach, I was still in search of my role. I didn't, I was recruiting kids that they had an intuition and a feel for the game that I had yet to develop. It's a little bit different down in Texas, and I decided I'm going to be, I'm gonna take on the responsibilities of a strength and conditioning coach, even though I didn't necessarily know what those would be because I didn't have one. And I my first practice leading a strength and conditioning session as a coach, we didn't have a weight room, small university Marymount. And what I had my athletes do, we needed overhead strength, we didn't have weights. So what I asked them to do is kick up and hold a handstand against one of our walls on the backfield, and one of my former teammates, current friend, but now my athlete, he kicked up into a handstand and tore his rotator cuff. So he was a senior, and I took away his last opportunity to play his sport that he loved. It was my fault. At that, I felt terrible. I had to go on and find a mentor, find someone to teach me actually how to be a strength and additioning coach, rather than just assuming I knew what the hell I was doing because I was strong and I was in shape. And through Google, and this is September 2009, I found John Wellbourne, and this was the dawn of CrossFit football. And John had started the seminar, and the fifth ever seminar was coming up in California, Oakland, California, and I was in grad school, grad school assistant coach, I had no money, so I paid my last dollar to fly out to California and learn for two days from John Wellbourne and then a man named Raphael Ruiz, who was leading the seminar. I asked a lot of questions, I was memorable, and a few years later, I was still coaching at the university, and John had twin daughters. He had taken on new employee Luke Summers, and they were looking for uh two new people to lead the Crosswood Football Seminar, to to to intern, to create an opportunity and grow that staff rather than being the small team. And I applied. Fortunately, I was memorable enough at that first seminar to ask the right questions and be, I guess, engaged within it, so that when I did apply, I stuck out and was memorable a few years later. And then I I decided that I was a better strength coach than I was a lacrosse coach. And on the weekends, I had the opportunity to travel on the East Coast, just interning with seminars with John and Luke, and then the opportunity at Georgetown University. I became strength coach with them and coached during the week, traveled on weekends, taught, led seminars, educating coaches and athletes on sports performance and using CrossFit for sports performance. And then eventually that turned into a full-time position and power athlete, what it is today. So it's been over 100 seminars traveling to six continents. Now with we've transitioned education to online and provide a variety of different training programs, but it all stemmed from me screwing up. I injured an athlete, took away their opportunity, and now I never want that to happen to anyone else. And there is a bias within movement and fitness that just because you're strong, you know what you're doing. And I I proved that wrong my first day. So it's it's coming at this with the approach and uh representing a brand that athletes and coaches can both connect with to say, hey, we we're here, we understand performance, and there's always a little bit more that you can you can learn and then apply to your athletes to empower their performance.

That's awesome, Troy. I mean, what uh the immediate question I have for you is what's the what's the one continent you didn't go to?

Uh Antarctica. Yeah, that was my first guess. So what did you do in the Arctic? Oh, did not go to was Antarctica. Uh the the Arctic Circle up north. Um as far north as I've been, I'm trying to remember the the country I'd have to pull up an a map here. But we went during the winter. Oh man, maybe it was Norway. It was dark for four straight days. I didn't see the sun. It was awful. I don't know how people live up there, but um they still banged weights and had a great, great attitude and a great time and had some good food. Um but yeah, we yeah, South Korea twice, Australia, South Africa, uh all over Europe, and Buenos Aires in uh South America. Yeah, and then all over the United States.

What uh did you have a one of your more memorable destinations that you you think you'll go back to someday? If not soon. Biasly Ireland. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, and been to Northern Ireland, a separate country, but the same island, and then Dublin and Galway. And my fortunately, my cousin had traced our our lineage back to Rathlin Island, which is north of Northern Ireland. So I even though I've been there a few times, I did get the opportunity to go visit. But now, if I didn't have to work, I'd really dig in and spend some time exploring up there. But it was beautiful, and the people were were were lights out. They were amazing.

Ah, it's so great, man. So great that you had a job, um, you know, a role within a great company to allow you to see the world like that. And I think uh a lot of people are pretty envious of looking for something like that. What um, so give me give me the layout. You know, I'm familiar, obviously, with the history of cross football, having been there, and you kind of explained a lot of it um before we we start recording here. But what is it that Power Athlete does, man? Who do you guys serve? What do you provide to them? What is the value? What uh give us give us the overview.

The we uh one of our taglines, so we have a few taglines, but one of my favorites is performance for the people. And from a a strength coach's and a sports coach's perspective, you try to protect your information. You don't want your community to know what you're doing. You have the secret magic sauce that you're putting your athletes through.

Right.

But it's not like that. So the the selfish high school coaches that are thinking that way rather than sharing with their community what they're doing within the weight room. So we teach the interested coaches. We have a number of parents that have been through our online education or in-person education experience, and they are there for their kids to teach their kids. We've even had one mother who taught her her sons how to lift weights, which eventually they grew into high school, and then she had the opportunity to take over strength education responsibilities and teaching barbell to their full student body athletes. And it's it's sound strength and conditioning principles. So our education is speaking to parents, coaches, or athletes themselves that are interested in deep diving and empowering their own performance. Our next audience is athletes themselves. We deliver a variety of training programs directly to them through our partnered app, Train Heroic. And this is reverse-engineered from different goals. Not all programs are created equal. So we have people that are very interested in putting on size. For that, we have Jack Street. Then we have performance-centric, that's our feel-strong program. We have high schoolers who are their first introduction to the barbell. We have an education of how to lift weights, and then a program to follow that gives you the opportunity to get strong in bedrock. And we also have a program for CEOs or new parents that have a variety of workout options throughout the week that you can hit two mandatory days and then three to four optional days if you have time, but you owe us two, and that's called a grindstone. So a lot of CEOs that we we know and are friends with, they're following that program as we're seeing this wave of new parents that just need 30 minutes twice a week to maintain as they they go through that survival and that fight of that first year, and a number of other programs. But the bottom line is it's reverse-engineered from a community's goals. And then they're delivered through an online training app. And we make the assumption that you're training in a garage gym. So it's not fancy equipment or these things that would be jiggy and cool. It's things you can do alone, assuming you have no training partners and the basics of a home garage gym.

Awesome. Great summary. So when you guys are doing your education, is uh was it traditionally in person? I mean, obviously you're traveling a lot, and is it now purely online or how what what how do you guys deliver that?

It it was all in person. And in 2017, we decided to transition to online and level up with our when we were leading the CrossFit football seminar. It was the same 16 hours delivered, and we were going to you. Now, what we've done is created a base level of knowledge that people can dive into, and that that's our power athlete methodology online course. And then now it you get into a position where you are applying the information as you're going through it, whether you're teaching yourself or your kids or high school athletes that you're working with or your personal training clients, you're applying the information, not like it's being thrown at you and you had to drink through a fire hose for two days. It's at your own pace. This is a base level of knowledge that then if you choose to and you have you are a professional coach, you can travel out to Austin for an in-person test. This is our our block one, and we felt that rather than providing a certificate of completion for the education and you coming out for your test, then we John welds different blocks. So as a representation that as much as you're investing your time and effort, we're going to give back to you. So he he stamps and welds these blocks that we hand off as our passing grade rather than just a piece of paper. And that's that's a test that encompasses comprehension, practical knowledge, your ability to teach and speak to basic barbell movements. And then it's also an educational experience. So we deep dive the application of different sprint training, ACL injury prevention assessments, that tools that any coach can apply, no matter the population, if they're working with youth, high school, or general pop. It's it's an education/slash testing two-day experience if you choose to take your education to the next level, but the online is still very valid.

Yeah, that's great. You know, I I I wonder, it sounds like I mean, when I hear the name power athlete, I automatically assume that it's for athletes who need to develop power, right? Um, which, you know, would make sense coming from a cross-fit football background. But it sounds like you guys are way more open than that. Like you're really into athletic development. Is that does that sound right? Or I mean, I'm I'm hearing a lot of kind of just general population, you know, athleticism. How how would you describe that?

I I would describe that as movement. So we're educating coaches how to teach movement, not movement. And I'll break that down for you. So teaching movement, that would be a representation of athleticism. And think about any general population goal that would exist. If we're looking at an older population, goals representative of I want to play golf on the weekends, I want to play with my kids or play with my grandkids. All of those goals and and general wellness things that people want to hold on to are represented through movement. And then if we're looking at our sport, our athletes, it's the same representation. If we're in able to improve their ability to move through space, then we can improve their opportunity to pick up skills faster. So it's it's simply how we view movement and then educate these coaches, then you damper the volume or the intensity in which you have have your athletes or your general population clients go through. When we're working with our coaches and speaking towards more gin pop, then it is more about behavior education. So we're empowering coaches on how to communicate to then change behaviors and have them understand the value of moving well. It's not scoreboard on the whiteboard and keeping track in that respect and creating competition within there. That's reserved for competitive athletes, that their performance, their livelihood relies on their execution. When it's more gen pop, it's consistency, it's reinforcing quality behaviors like showing up on time or record recording your weights through the app. That way you can help show them the benefit or show them the progress through these simple behaviors. It's it's using numbers to help reinforce behavior rather than making the goals the numbers. So it's all about communication, but how we teach the squat, the step, and the lunge, it doesn't change other than communicating the end goal with the athlete. So set up the execution for squats, steps, and lunge. We would teach and educate the coach the same way to execute, but then the appeal, the connection. That is dependent on the athlete's goal. But squat, squatting, stepping, lunging, and finding a connection between those three where different quote unquote movements, it's it's still movement through space.

You know, I I've definitely noticed a trend. I'm curious if you've probably on top of this, but um the term movement, right? A lot of people, um, I think in the last one to two years have shifted from exercise and fitness to, well, I guess specifically the word exercise to movement. Have you noticed that? Or is that something that you guys emphasize to your coaches and to your clients?

I I feel that we've been preaching that for a long time. So introducing seamless, if we were speaking to an athlete population, it would be seamless and effortless movement through space. And that's the very aesthetically pleasing. The people we're gonna watch on like the NFL playoffs or through the NBA, it just looks effortless and it's amazing. And then when we speak to the general population, it would be representative of a pain-free movement. So I I hope that the the rest of the fitness communities begins to speak in this language because that would be better long term. If the the industry is stuck in the the pounds lost or the numbers game that you would play on the whiteboard, the leaderboard, then it's it's gonna be very cyclical and always come back to people falling out of love of movement and fitness and health because they had a bad experience or they couldn't progress within a respect to one lift, then they throw away their entire movement and fitness goals. So I hope it's trending in this direction, but that's that's how we've been communicating for a long time.

Yeah, it is. I'm pretty confident saying it is. Uh, you know, I got my uh my ear to the ground and a lot of this stuff. And uh I do I it's something I've noticed for sure. You know, so today's recording date, audience, is January 8th, 2021. Uh, so we can kind of now look back. We've taken a little break, maybe a little breather, although 2021's started off to a weird, it's got a weird start. Um, we don't need to get into that. Uh what's changed for you guys over 2020? What did you notice from maybe messaging to your clients' needs, um, to your business? Did you guys, you know, did you see spikes? Did you see one? Because I I asked this question for a lot of reasons because A, I'm generally curious, but B, I've also noticed that a lot of people who did uh who do education for the coaching industry got really busy last year. Um, I think a lot of people took the time off. Um, maybe, who knows, maybe they took their stimulus check and they applied it towards improving themselves. Did you notice anything like that?

We in in two respects, we did. One with the training population, we found that they were resilient, they were flexible, and they were investing in creating that home gym experience for themselves rather than relying on their their community facility to remain open. And we helped facilitate that through providing a training program that we called third monkey. Like you're the third monkey in line on Noah's Ark and it's starting to rain. So, representative of that personality of you refuse to be told that you can't do what you want to do. And body weight only exercises are not gonna keep you resilient, strong, and more importantly, healthy. And our third monkey program, what we did was uh Luke and I went to the hardware store. We had a budget of 50 bucks, and then Luke's a math guy. He broke down essentially the cost per pound, and what we found were two 35-pound cinder blocks plus a imagine a orange Home Depot bucket, and then a 60-pound bag of dried concrete, pour that sucker into the bucket, put a lid on that, and then we have a hundred pounds of weight that we can use. And how the programming worked, rather than that strong squat that you have with this perfectly balanced barbell, we would manipulate the setup on a squat to where you were weaker and had our community getting strong within their weaknesses and not comparing themselves to their their barbell numbers, but their ability to move well. Example, imagine I'm hugging that Home Depot bucket out in front. So it'll be a front carry, similar to a front squat, but rather than just knocking out reps, we would ask our athletes to go ahead and do a calf raise and balance up onto their toes. So now we're in an active foot position and then executing that squat. You're only able to go as low as you can maintain this tall, pretty foot position. So now we're attacking weak feet, which in anything that we we've talked about in in terms of performance and sprinting and power, the foot is very important. So if people follow up on our blog or a podcast, you're gonna see a lot of foot information and articles, even one of our online courses that we partnered up with physical therapist Matt Zanis with is all about foot health. We had this opportunity through Third Monkey to really bias people's weakness within the foot. So manipulating different setups, we had people forcing them, their love of fitness and movement, but now with limited weight, we had to get creative to focus on their limitations. So we're we're grateful that people were flexible and the pandemic, the lockdown is still going on for many. So that program is going strong and they got a great community within the feeds. So we love that. Then with with our other population, our coaches, our online education, we did see growth, and that we we've had a foothold in the online space since 2017. So now we're seeing a trend of the fitness industry that this form of education is accepted. While I loved, love the in-person experience through the the CrossFit level one, the the CrossFit football that we had, or going to different conferences and networking and sitting in on presentations. I love that in-person stuff. Now the rest of the industry is starting to see, okay, I can learn through the online experience. So we saw a growth within our our methodology course, and then we put out two new courses. I mentioned the foot course, and as well as uh we we're calling this our trainer's course because it's speaking to the entry-level personal trainer. So where our methodology is deep within strength and additioning performance principles, our trainer's course is more that behavior, that introduction of you finally have clients that you're connecting with. Okay, here's how to keep them long term and create clients for life. So you're empowering them, and we introduce an athlete's journey of some fears that they have when they first begin, how to get them to write goals in which you can empower them, and then they become your billboard. How they how you communicate to them to then communicate to others about your services and your experience. So that entry-level trainer and coaches, we see more people entering the fitness industry because it is there's opportunities everywhere. Guess all you need in terms of overhead is nothing. You need a park and some good social media or some friends that you can convince to come join you, and then other people are jogging in the park that you can speak to, say, hey, come join us this time. So it was um that was a fun experience putting together that presentation and then um delivering that information to be able to package it up and speak to a new audience rather than the coach. It's the the entry-level trainer to empower them. And then when they're ready or they take on their clients' high school student, their uh their kids, they're ready for that barbell and prepare them for their fitness and sports journey.

It's uh that's so that makes me happy because I think you know, I helped build a lot of certifications over the past few years. And uh the thing that we always you know really insisted on was that each piece of of coaching education had to have what I call the now what, right? Okay, cool. Well, you you learned all this really great information on coaching and program design and movement, but now what? And that's I think that you know, so what do you well, how how do I get a client? How do I work with them? How do I build them? How do I build out, you know, long-term experience like you're talking about that keeps them coming back and has that client for life? And uh that's critical, man. When when did you guys recognize that that was so important?

Well, it we asked the problem was we were assuming throughout a lot of the the sports performance, even the cross foot football journey, we were assuming that since they were in front of us as students, that they had these these clients. But what we we it took us a while to factor in is they they just wanted education. They wanted to know more. And we had this assumption that they were having clients. And through the education development, the number one thing that we were focused on is the lens of application. Okay, we're going to introduce in this order these different movement selections, these how we communicate and present our directions and cueing is in this order because we are first-time athletes. It's not how we're gonna, this is how we teach the squat, end of chapter. This is how we teach the lunch, end of chapter. No, where are the threads between this? Okay, they're going to follow a program in which they have these warmups. Okay, they're gonna squat and press that day, then the next day they're going to deadlift and do pull-ups. So we're presenting these education or these movements as they would be delivered to an athlete. And that was very important for us. And in respect to the the trainer's course, well, number one, it was I was speaking to behaviors. We needed them to always show up on time. Here's how you're going to introduce and and and demonstrate these movements, and here's how you finish your session. That end point, the first touch point and the last touch point of your day are so critical. The coaches that we were through the cross football and even online, and the the trainers that we were working with and doing some market research with were so focused on programming and providing the perfect program to their clients that they forgot that these clients were athletes with aspirations or people with goals and needs. So, how were we able to mend both the desire for them to master the art of programming with the understanding that these are people? So it was through goals, it was through aim and understanding and communicating that, then organizing the programming for the coaches to apply it and then teaching in the right pieces and movements that build off one another as they're going through the program, the education program, and the program that they're writing to give to their clients. So that that was a lot of fun and fortunate that we had a lot of coaches to be a soundboard as they're going through it and then make adjustments as we needed to. Like I mentioned, we introduced the methodology course in 2017, but it's been reiterated and corrected based off what we are seeing. So the beauty of the coaches coming to us in person to test their communication and their teaching and coaching, that's our test for online education. So anything that we are seeing commonly in uh performed or executed or communicated back to us poorly, okay, well, that's on us because they are using our information and and and communicating it to their athletes, not parroting us and just ticking boxes, no, communicating movement and coaching. All right, they misinterpret this piece of information, all right. We're gonna go back into our squat presentation and lecture and reframe it this way because and so it it was, and in the beginning, we were using our our our CrossFit football model of movement in the squat, and then we the the community was so far in one direction in terms of setup where I I forget the exact specifics of the level one, but maybe heels directly underneath your hips and toes out 30 degrees. Well, we don't want to have our athletes squat this way, so we asked them to set up heels outside the shoulders and then toes forward. So that was interpreted a little bit wider than we wanted it to be. We want this this beautiful A-frame position, like a linebacker setup or a tennis player or volleyball player ready to return a serve, very reactive position. We want to use that to overload within the squat. Now that was misinterpreted since people were so far narrow, then our communication and how we deliver that was wider than heels underneath your hips with toes out. It was misinterpreted, it was way too wide. So we had to go back into the online education, how we were teaching the squat, and then uh correct and calibrate is the word I'm looking for to calibrate to deliver the information that the people are showing up to our test if it is correct. So it's been this uh communication back and forth. How are people applying the information? How are they coming back to us? And if we're hearing things we shouldn't or seeing movement that is incorrect, then our interpretation, that's on us as educators. We're not blaming anyone but ourselves to then correct and then empower our students, which are coaches, which then translate to the athletes. We want zero misinterpretation by those coaches because us as athletes, John Luke and myself, we need, we we understand the competitive window closes so quickly. And I'm grateful for the opportunities that sport provided me to go to school, and I know John as well, with scholarship and then the NFL. So we want other athletes to have that same opportunity, and we don't want a coach to misinterpret or set up an execution of a squat, lunge, step, bench press, anything that could compromise in the weight room and potentially lead to injury or poor performance within the court or the field. Awesome, man.

I love it. So, you know, I I this is the future of fitness, right? Uh it's the title of my show. And I'm curious now that we've kind of not that you know December 31st uh is some magic day where everything wipes clean and it's it's all gone, but you know, I think there is a mental aspect to okay, we we got it, we got through that. Uh what do you think looking forward into 2021? How do you think the fitness industry is going to be different? I think we're gonna say fitness and coaching.

Fitness and coaching, I feel strongly about the garage gym. And there is this bum rush for equipment that's Facebook Marketplace is charging a dollar fifty to two dollars a pound, which is ridonculous expensive. And then there's back orders at Rogue and Sornex and all those for a long time, but that is going to calm down. The market will return to homeostasis in that respect, and the people that truly want to invest in that home gym will start to begin to do that intelligently, and then from there, they have this tool, and I hope that they begin to hand it down to their their children, or and this this is part of my goals in dripping springs is to bring it to my community to be have a garage gym that's open to anyone anyone that wants to learn how to lift weights. And I'm coaching middle school lacrosse right now, so that is beginning with that that branch of the community, but open to anyone, where we're teaching proper setup execution, using the barbell to then change lives. So I feel that garage gym can be a pillar within the family to then, if we're we're talking long-term, create a healthy relationship with weights and movement and fitness within your family that then is just normal for the kids that then go in to grow up and it's just the way they are. So we can create this reverberation of health, fitness, and valuable movement that can be handed down. So I foresee that, but that's again my bias because our clientele is that garage gym athlete, and I hope it goes this way, rather than technology of we see the the bikes or the uh the mirrors on the wall, but that's still body weight. When we talk about weightlifting and creating a mentally resilient individual, it's that stress and belief at one moment and instant that I can't get this, but then you do. And it builds some form of resiliency and character and fight. And if you can hand that down to your community or your kids, then we we have this you this confident people that are resilient and can withstand stress through perseverance and putting the world on their shoulders and not letting it get to them. So that is how I would like to see it. And I hope to, and I'm I'm confident within the community, at least that follows a power athlete program, is is beginning to do that.

Oh, that's great, man. Great vision. What are you guys doing? What are you guys unleashing in in Q1? Anything, uh, anything coming down the pipe? We're we're pouring gasoline on Power Athlete Radio, our our podcast.

We've we've we've jumped into the top 30 fitness podcasts on iTunes and continuing to explore different uh ambassadors within the community and finding experts in. I mentioned the foot earlier, so let's find podiatrists that are doing amazing things for the foot, not just regular physical therapists or doctors or thinkers, people that are aiming to revolutionize and increase the perspective and the value of movement for individual application. So not the uh crazy muscle fiber scientist, rather someone that's talking about the application of Olympic weightlifting for power and speed that then our listener can apply to themselves or their athletes or their their kids, or just have an understanding to protect them from some nonsense that may be out floating around the internet. Awesome.

Well, that's exciting, man. I mean, uh, you know, podcasting is such a great way to get messaging across and uh and really kind of build a digital tribe, right? And I I don't think, you know, uh I don't think podcasting is going anywhere. I think it's still um it's a very, very bright future. Otherwise, I of course I wouldn't have done you know 600 interviews so far. Um yeah, man. Well, this is great. I I really appreciate it. I love the insights. I love the um, I guess the mission that you guys are on, the way you're approaching it. It's uh it's great. You know, it's it's high quality and it's kind of what the core of of strength and conditioning really is. And you guys are doing a great job with it. So well done. Uh Chris, where where do people find you? Where do you send them online?

Thank you very much. First off, and then if anyone wants to learn more, it's powerathhletehq.com. That would have our training programs. We even have a little training quiz where you, like I mentioned earlier, all of our programs are reverse engineered from a goal. So we go through and find out time parameters or barriers that you may have, your training goal, and then give you a seven-day trial for the best program offering that we have. So powerathlethq.com for more training. If you're interested in education, if you are a fitness professional and want to learn more about behavior change and communication or coaching movement, head to academy.powerathletehq.com. For social, I would push you towards PowerAthletes Instagram. We have we have some fun themes that that go through there. It's not only educational content, but also some just reprieve from the world with our be the hammer posts, if you've seen those. So that's at PowerAthlethq on Instagram. And personally, my is just my last name through Instagram. That's where filming different movements with John in the weight room and talking through coaching perspective of okay, this is what I'm seeing, this is where people will fail. And here's what I want you to either feel or look for if you're a coach, and that is at McQuilkin M C Q U I L K I N.

Awesome. Well, Chris, thank you so much once again for spending a Friday afternoon with me on the future of fitness. It's been uh it's been a lot of fun. And uh hopefully we'll uh we'll get your back up. We'll get you back on here. What do you think?

Oh, yeah. Anytime, man. And the the future, hopefully, will be the garage gym, and we'll see that explode. So I'll I'll be out here to then remind everyone what we talked about this episode to say I was right. Hopefully. I love it. Awesome.

Ladies and gentlemen, Chris McQuilkin. All right, thank you, Eric. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the feature of fitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.